16 March 2010 | As several countries around the world busily keep moving forward with their REDD+ readiness plans, the supporting UN-REDD and World Bank Programs will be meeting next week in Vietnam to take stock and consider some important new proposals.

This study presents the results of recent studies of community forest management in Mexico in the belief that it can inspire other countries and peoples to follow similar paths. Devolving rights over forest land and its resources, including carbon, to the local level is not a panacea for deforestation and forest degradation or the only necessary ingredient for forest-based carbon capture.

The Government of British Columbia is developing a Forest Carbon Offset Protocol (FCOP) over the coming months that will guide the design, development, quantification and verification of B.C forest carbon offsets from a broad range of forest activities on private and public land in B.C. Forest carbon is an increasingly significant component of climate action, and the protocol will ensure that forest carbon offsets developed in B.C. meet domestic and international quality standards. Given the importance of the forested land base in the province, this project is a key element in sustaining B.C.’s reputation as a leader in climate action in North America.

International Emissions Trading Association (IETA) side event #33 at COP16/CMP6

Panel Description
Africa is home to the planets second largest tropical rainforest, and represents one of the fastest emerging markets in forest carbon. What are the challenges and opportunities in developing high quality forest carbon projects in Africa. This panel will examine the current state of the forest carbon market in Africa from both marketing and management perspectives, with particular attention to on-the-ground realities, including the roles of funders, private developers, NGOs and local communities.

Tropical rainforests have been a cause celebre among environmentalists and climate change activists for decades. But research released in advance of this week’s climate conference in Cancun shows that hectare-for-hectare British Columbia’s rainforests store twice as much carbon.

The world’s forests are disappearing at an alarming rate. Not only does this endanger biodiversity and the livelihoods of forest-dependent communities, it is a major contributing factor to global climate change. It is a challenge that needs to be addressed

ZITACUARO, Mexico (AP) This small patch of mountain fir forest is a model of sorts for the global effort to save trees and fight climate change. The problem is that saving trees has not saved the forest’s most famous visitors: Monarch butterflies.

Millions of Monarch butterflies migrate here from the United States and Canada every year, but their numbers declined by 75 percent last year alone, apparently because of changing weather and vegetation patterns.

Forests in the Interior West could soon flip from carbon sink to carbon source, forest experts say.

The region’s forests once absorbed and stored more carbon from the atmosphere than they released. But huge conflagrations — like the 138,000-acre Hayman Fire in Colorado in 2002 and the Yellowstone fires of 1988, which scorched 1.2 million acres — combined with a series of severe bark beetle infestations and disease outbreaks, have left large swaths of dead, decomposing trees in almost every major Western forest.

The European Union may allow use of emission credits from forest protection to help fill any gap from a ban of some industrial-gas credits, a banker at BNP Paribas SA said.

The EU carbon market may have room in its third phase, which runs from 2013 to 2020, for credits under a program known as Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, or REDD, should the bloc restrict industrial-gas credits and adopt a tighter emission-reduction target for 2020, said Christian Del Valle, director of environmental markets and forestry at the Paris-based bank. The regions target is currently to cut emissions by 20 percent from 1990 levels.

KALIMANTAN, Indonesia–The forests here, threatened by years of logging and slash-and-burn agriculture, are becoming a battleground where countries race to pick up potential future carbon credits to meet pledged emission caps.

WSHINGTON — The U.S. Forest Service released new estimates Friday of the total carbon storage of U.S. forests, highlighting the important role America’s forests play in the fight against climate change.

Following a rigorous probe into a claim by the United Kingdom-based Global Witness regarding the arrest of a UK citizen who had been granted 400,000 hectares of Liberian forest to harvest carbon credits, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has fired, with immediate effect, Peggy Varflay Meres, Executive Director of the Public Procurement and Concession Commission (PPCC) and two others.

Indonesian pulp and paper firm Asia Pulp and Paper (APP) has signed a deal to protect 15,640 hectares of peat forest in Sumatra in exchange for carbon payments, reports Reuters.

Under the agreement signed with Carbon Conservation, a forest carbon broker based in Singapore, APP supplier PT Putra Riau Perkasa will forgo conversion of a concession located in carbon-dense peat forest on the Kampar Peninsula in Sumatra. The deal could avoid emissions of million tons of carbon dioxide over its 33-year life.

REDD+ Partnership talks officially launched on Monday after a weekend workshop. Since then, the Partners haven’t completed a single agenda item, and a large number of donors, recipients, and stakeholders lay the blame on co-chairs Papua New Guinea and Japan. A spokesperson for the Rainforest Coalition, however, says donors are stalling to avoid paying their share.

OSLO (Reuters) – Nations including Democratic Republic of Congo are making surprise progress towards taking part in a $200 million project for slowing deforestation from late 2010, World Bank experts said.

They also said Latin America, with forested nations around the Amazon, had strong incentives to take part since most of the continent’s greenhouse gas emissions came from deforestation and shifts in land use, rather than use of fossil fuels.

Globally, the loss of forests now contributes almost 20% of carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere. There is an immediate need to reduce the current rates of forest loss, and the associated release of carbon dioxide, but for many areas of the world these rates are largely unknown.

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